Best MAME for old computer?

Hello I am building a MAME arcade, I have a old arcade cabinet with a 19 inch arcade monitor (sharp image SI-319)

In the beggining I was just using my computer (athlon 3800+ dual core, 3GB ram) and it worked just fine, but now I got a computer that I want to use for my arcade (i need my computer back you know)

The new CPU is a IBM net vista 3806 with a Pentium IV @ 1.8ghz, nvidia geforce mx 4 (agp 4x 64mb) and 256MB of ram

I formated the "new" computer, Installed windows and its drivers (soft15 and omegadrivers) and the machine was ready to go, but when I run MAME (I use MAMEui32 v0.135u1) the games (mortal kombat, metal slug 5, even galaga!) start to stutter

I've already searched in the forums and I don't sync or tripple buffer anything, I have throttling enabled and I even tried adjusting latency but no luck yet.

is there something I could try? I don't want to use a older version becasue most of my games won't work on those :(

thanks in advance :bow:

You will need to use a version of Mame 0.106 or earlier. Mame underwent some major architectural changes at 0.107 and has continued to increase the hardware requirements ever since.

Bear in mind that Mame roms are updated on a regular basis, so if you're winding back to a much older version of the emulator you are going to need to change/repair/replace a large number of roms too.

You can get older versions of the commandline version from the main Mame site and you can get older versions of MameUI/32 from www.joymonkey.com

There is no tweak you can do to make newer versions of the emulator run faster on that hardware. Newer versions require newer hardware (just like newer games do). So you're stuck either using an older version on that PC or using a more up to date PC with the version and romset that you've got.

what about my games? is there a way to get them working in a old mame? (metal slug 1-5, marvel vs capcom)

You'll need an older version of the roms and an older version of the bios (neogeo.zip). You could try using Clrmamepro to create a dat from the older version of mame and rebuild your set. Any roms that have only been renamed or had things added to the existing files should regress without any problems. For Roms that have had new dumps or changes though you will need to source one's relevant to your version of mame.

well, just onelast question, you think I could keep using the same MAMEui32 v0.135u1 if I upgrade to a Dell computer with 256MB RDRAM and a pentium IV @ 2.6ghz?

Nope. Even that would be underspecced for current builds of Mame.

As a minimum you should aim for 2.5Ghz+ Dual Cored CPU, 2Gb + of Ram and ideally a 64 bit OS to run all the usual stuff without issue on builds over 0.130

A 2.6 P4 should be ok up to about 0.128 or thereabouts but you'll still need at least a couple of GB of Ram in it. Ram is dirt cheap now so why not use that, and stick 2Gb of Ram in it. You'll still need to change some of your roms but nowhere near as many.

OK, so here's what happened:

I wasn't able to use the 2.6ghz dell computer cuz the motherboard was damaged, USB ports weren't working anymore, but i was able to use the CPU in my IBM computer (talk about good luck)

I formated the computer and tried again with mymame 135u1 it worked fine, but when I connected it with my arcade monitor, sound messed up again, before giviong up and using mame 106 I changed direct3d to directdraw, the mame menu looks blurry but the games worked fine! tried metal slug 5, mortal kombat and galaga (used to stutter) and they are working and look great :D

hope this info could be useful sometime

thanks fat trucker for your information about mame

I'm glad I was able to use 135u1 because I use a lot the horizontal stretch adjust (already have the monitor adjusted at minimum and I can't see the borders in most games)

Maybe I'm running a *really* old version of MAME but all my versions of MAME don't run worth a flip on anything higher than XP like Vista or Windows 7.

I once had an old IBM with a Pentium 90 that wouldn't run any version of MAME.

My favorite version of MAME is version 28 or .28 or something like that. That version will run on anything with a 100 Mhz processor and 32 MB of RAM.

Version 30 doesn't allow the screen to stretch so I don't use it much.

The last version I downloaded was .36 BETA 11 and never could get it to work right. I stored all my ROMs in directories but the emulator says they don't exist.

My old PC is: HP Pavilion Media Center PC m7334n (which started manufacturing December 2005),
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core 2GHz CPU, 1GB DDR Memory, HP vs17 17" LCD Monitor.

I tried MAME32 0.77 (with alot of matching ROMs), and MAMEUI32 0.187 (with alot of matching ROMs).
They were both really slow until I found this simple fix (this makes MAME way faster!):


MAME32 0.77:
Click "Options", "Default Game Options". Click the "Advanced" tab, check "Use DirectDraw", check "Sync to monitor refresh", click "Ok".

MAMEUI32 0.187:
Click "Options", "Default System Options". Click the "Advanced" tab, check "Sync to monitor refresh", click "Ok".